Chicken Update

It has been a while since we have had any chicken updates. Basically because there has not been a whole lot to update. Here are the updates we have as of right now:

They are like most of the neighborhood chickens that have been reduced to hanging out in their chicken run during the day (the exception to this rule is the house with 8 roosters - only a stupid fox would mess with that house). In our neighborhood there are 7 houses with chickens. The one day I took one out, it freaked out on me, because it knew that the fox was right there waiting for me to set it down on the ground. Thankfully, I figured it out before I set her down. The results: She stares me down every time I get near the run.

I do bring them into the garden with me since it is fenced in. When our garden was plentiful, I would only bring them out one at a time because they love tomatoes and trying to keep the chickens from eating my tomatoes and the toddler from ripping everything out of the ground was a lot of work. Since most of my vegetables have run the course of their growing season, all four now join me in the garden.
Little man spends a lot of time looking for worms to feed them. I should mention that before he realized that the chickens will eat them, he would not touch the things. Run screaming in the other direction was more like it. So is it worth it? You tell me.

Keep checking back, we should have eggs sometime in the next 4 weeks or so, depending on who you talk to.

Apple Season

I love fall

Little man needed some help getting to the good apples.

My little chef

Yum, homemade applesauce!

Eat Local Challenge: How To Fail Spectacularly

This week (September 11 -19) is the week for the Eat Local Challenge in Vermont. (See Cari's post from Sept.4 about the challenge to eat local for a month...)

To provide a little background, an Eat Local Challenge attempts to encourage people to eat only foods sourced locally. Locally is defined in different ways by various people, but in Vermont, local means anything produced inside the borders of the state (as the VT Dept of Ag says: inside the state or within thirty miles of the state's borders). There is a "Marco Polo" clause that allows the use of spices and seasonings that 'a sailor could carry in his pockets for six months' - that makes salt, pepper, and things like that "legal". (It's not like there's a food police that's going to arrest you if an unapproved ingredient is used....) The idea behind Eating Locally is to make consumers aware of where their food comes from; how much fuel/energy/resources and effort go into the production and transportation of many "normal" foods. Challenges also showcase the flavor and freshness of local products, introduce the concept of eating foods 'in-season', and increase the money flowing towards the local economy (farmers and other producers).

Now that we know what the Eat Local Challenge is, how did our family do?

We failed miserably.

Normally, we try to eat healthy and "real" foods. Things that are not processed, created synthetically, or contain ingredients that are bigscaryscientificwords. "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" is the philosophy that we've adopted. We can't put ourselves up on a pedestal as being totally true to that philosophy - we make mistakes, get lazy, and sometimes just don't see where we make wrong food choices.

We make good choices:

- we stopped making iced tea from a powdered mix because, well, using tea bags to brew our own is real tea instead of, "Sugar, citric acid (provides tartness), instant tea, silicon dioxide (prevents caking), natural lemon flavor, artificial color (red #40)". Home-brewed is cheaper and tastes better, too. We don't sweeten our tea - notice that sugar is the first ingredient in the mix...

-we switched from "Brand X" vegetable oil spread to real butter. Wandering through the grocery store one day, we found a small tub of salted butter - the only ingredients being milk cream and sea salt. It tastes pretty much the same as the oleo, but doesn't have nineteen ingredients (of which only three are recognizable - the other sixteen aren't even easy to pronounce).

We make bad choices:

- every once in a while, we purchase and eat tubs of pre-made mashed potatoes. Those loaded mashed potatoes with bacon and ham and chemicals and preservatives....For a small premium of time (maybe twenty minutes), we could prep real potatoes, boil them, and mash them - no chemicals or artificial flavors. This bad food choice comes down to laziness and poor meal planning.

- we buy plain ol' regular supermarket chicken (and pork and beef). Despite reading numerous authors' works on how industrial farms produce chicken (and pork/beef) and the, um...what's the word?..., appalling conditions in which these chickens are raised and processed, we still toss that styro tray of meat into the shopping cart. Why? We do it mostly because we are accustomed to eating meat as a regular protein source, and the industrial stuff costs less at checkout.

We make un-informed (or by-mistake) choices:

- we were in the store picking out some veggies for a salad (our garden wasn't so productive this year), and decided to get some bell peppers. The sign above the peppers stated that they were from a very local farm - good, since we're trying to muddle our way through an "Eat Local Challenge". In an attempt to include Little Man in the shopping choices, we let him choose which pepper (by color) to get. He picked the orange-colored peppers, so we put them in the cart. It wasn't until much later that we noticed the sign about the local farm was only for the green peppers - the orange one we picked was grown in Mexico. Chalk that poor choice up to misleading marketing/cross-eyed sign reading.

- we used to make mistakes by seeing a phrase that seemed to be good on a label, but turned out to be not so good. Examples? Buying wheat bread instead of 100% whole grain wheat bread. All-Natural - manufacturers are allowed to use the term 'all-natural' for synthetic compounds derived from a substance found in nature - that means that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be the main ingredient in an "all-natural" drink or snack. Ever seen HFCS occuring naturally? Going back to our guiding philosophy, do you think that Great-Grandmother would recognize HFCS as food?

It seems that your author has gone off on a ranting tangent and veered away from our central theme - eating locally. Please forgive the interruption.

To get back to the eat local results, we need to take a peek at some of the reasons our family failed. Mainly, it boils down to the fact that we did not draw up our normal weekly menu/shopping list. For a typical week, we plan every meal for each day. The meal plan is (a pain-in-the-a**) a carefully crafted document that tries to provide healthy meals. It also has to plan meals around the schedules of three people, have enough variety to stave off complaints, ensure meals are easy (read: quick - less than thirty minutes) to make, and, above all, make sure that the weekly grocery total stays low. Toss in the goals of sourcing food locally and following the "Great-Grandmother" philosophy, and you end up needing a lot of energy and focus to create the meal plan. It also requires more money to eat clean/healthy/local than it does to eat processed/unhealthy food. This week, we were short on money and time. Thus, we ate things that were quick and easy - but not necessarily good for us. Too bad that the eat local challenge didn't come a week later....after payday!

What the Eat Local Challenge did do for our family was to sharpen our focus on our food. As stated before, we're usually pretty good at following our chosen food philosophy. This week, as we made 'bad' choices (due to time constraints, budget shortfalls, or laziness), we were sure to identify a 'good' alternative. We started to weed out the areas of our eating that we hadn't addressed before due to ignorance or laziness. Even though we failed (bombed/choked/fell short) miserably at the Challenge, we still intend to work the "Eat Local" idea into our meals.

Spoiled Rabbit

I figured I had not posted any new updates on the bunny recently. To sum up her life in one word: "spoiled". She lives in our mud room and, while she spends most of the day in her rabbit hutch, when little man goes to bed we let her roam the mud room. In fact, either Andy or I will sit with her in the mud room and read. We do occasionally let her out when little man is awake, but the visit is often short lived since, like any toddler, he does not quite get the term gentle.

Some pictures of our spoiled rabbit:

She has learned how to jump up onto the bench which is about 2 feet off the ground.

She constantly wants attention.

"I know my food is in there."

"I am going to chew my way out of this mud room. "

Small Farms Food Festival........Or Not

Since we have lived here, I have wanted to go to the Small Farms Food Festival at Shelburne Orchards. It boasts of all sorts of wonderful kids activities and a chance to sample food from several small local farms. In their defense, I will say it was a great chance to sample food from several local farms, some of which I had never heard of before. Among those our favorites were Stony Pond Farm, Taylor Farm, Vermont Pickle, Bread and Butter Farm, and Folk Foods. There were some that were not among our favorites, but I won't go there.

Now with that out of the way, while I loved sampling the food from local farms, I will probably never go to the Small Farms Food Festival every again. You see, I have this thing for having to pay $5 to get into an event and not actually getting anything for free and having to deal with the large crowd. Now some could argue that the music was free, but that just isn't going to do it for me, when they are charging $2 for the tractor ride around the orchard and their supposed "hay maze" is a short tunnel that the kids have already done a pretty good job of destroying. Did I mention we were there within the first hour of them being open? Being a big festival family (apple festivals, kids festivals, brewers festivals, garlic festivals, you name it), I understand how this whole thing should work. Either you charge to get in and have some (not all, I understand people need to come out on top at these things) things for free, or you don't charge to get in and charge for everything. Honestly, I really don't care as long as you don't charge me to get in and then charge for everything you have to offer.

OK, I am done with my little rant for the day and am going to enjoy some more of the fresh bread that we picked up. Although, if I wait a little bit, there will be warm fresh bread. I have noticed that when we go to these things, my husband comes home and tries to outdo any bread maker I have just bought bread from. Did I mention he has not baked bread since May when his parents came to visit? (From the editor: it's been too hot to run the oven in the house!)

I love this time of year!

The farm down the street from us.

For Comparison

You've all heard me complain about the soil in my garden. This past week we purchased a soil test kit because my dad is bringing us blueberry bushes and we want them to survive, so we actually tested a few different areas. The one to the left is the soil from our vegetable garden, the one to the right is where we are going to put it next year. Need I say more?

Eat Local Challenge

During the month of September, Vermont does this 'eat local' challenge. Andy and I have always talked about doing it, since we eat a lot of local food, but have never actually attempted to do it. The challenge is to eat food from local producers for a month. Now, the degrees of local vary from person to person and some people go all out and some people make certain exceptions to the rule (salt, for example, is not produced locally). Some people vary their definition of local, 50 miles from home, 100 miles, comes from Vermont, etc.

Because I am not taking the holistic approach, here is the definition for our family: It must be produced in the state of New Hampshire or Vermont. My dad often brings food over with him from New Hampshire when he comes (he has already told little man he is bringing carrots for his bunny tomorrow) and since it is cross-country season, I have races along the Vermont/New Hampshire boarder and one that actually takes place in New Hampshire. That and I grew up in New Hampshire, so why not? Also if we already have the food in the house, we're eating it! Spices and things like that do not count (I like salt, get over it!) and all bets are off tomorrow when we go to the fair.(YAY! THE FAIR! FRIED DOUGH!-pardon the interruption,it's just your editor) Although, they do have a few booths that do sell local food like maple creemees and apple crisp. Other than that, we are eating locally.

Here are some highlights so far:

The weather has been hot and it is much cooler outside than in this week, so we had friends over to hang out in the back yard and enjoy the evening. My enticement: pie! Of course, one of my other friends brought pizza and wine, which was just as good. We also had the friend who we are pretty sure bailed because she is the only one with air conditioning in the group and she didn't want to leave it

OK, so this one is kind of cool. Our school has this crazy senior project that all students have to do called graduation challenge. Because of the project, the middle schools that feed into our school, do something called an 8th grade challenge. This one kid, Alec, took a family recipe and went into business selling these pretzels http://www.alecsspicypretzels.com/. They became so popular that he now sells them everywhere. They are pretty good.

I was just impressed that Andy found meat that didn't cost a fortune. (It did cost a small fortune - I just wanted local chicken.)

This one is actually the source of some debate in our family. Andy hates corn, but I love corn on the cob in the summer. Little Man not only loves it, but has a ton of fun shucking the corn beforehand. Mommy 1 Daddy 0